Is this progress?

My office for my new job is in the University of Washington’s Health Sciences Building, the same building where I spent several years as a graduate student. That’s not the weird part, though. The weird part is that, although I’m now in a completely different field, and although Health Sciences is an enormous structure (a third of a mile long and, in one part, 16 stories high), I’m stationed just down the hall from the lab where I did my graduate work. I go up one floor to the hospital cafeteria for mid-afternoon salads, just as I used to. Sometimes I park at the bike rack I used to use — although my bicycle is nicer now, my helmet and lock are the same — and sometimes I run into my old adviser there.

One obvious difference is that, although I’m once again on the negative-1st floor (or the 0th floor, depending on your numbering conventions), my new boss’ office is on the 13th floor. At the start of a recent meeting with him, I casually mentioned that all the stair-climbing might help me prepare for my next event — “a 100-mile race with 18,000 feet of cumulative elevation gain.”

“Oh, are you doing Western States?” he asked with an equally casual tone. “I once had a rotation student [Carol O’Hear] who ran that one. Her first time, the medical staff made her stop at mile 97. She was really upset about that.”

A boss who is familiar with and unfazed by 100-mile races? That’s different, too.